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Release of RESERVOIR Cloud Stack

Featuring OpenNebula for Cloud Management and Federation

RESERVOIR, flagship of European projects in cloud computing technology coordinated by IBM, has just announced the release of its cloud stack featuring Claudia Service Manager (Telefonica’s tool for automatic management of service scalability), OpenNebula Cloud Toolkit and security services for cloud federation. The RESERVOIR Cloud Stack supports the delivery of services on an on-demand basis, across countries, at competitive costs and without requiring a large capital investment in infrastructure. RESERVOIR enables the migration of resources across distributed administrative domains, maximizing resource exploitation, and minimizing costs to the end-user with guaranteed quality of service.  RESERVOIR defines an open federated infrastructure cloud architecture and delivers a framework of open source components you can download from the RESERVOIR website and integrate to build your own open source cloud infrastructure.

The Claudia platform offers a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public, private or hybrid IaaS cloud. It provides a Dashboard and a standard TCloud API based on OVF to support provisioning of PaaS and SaaS. The Claudia platform is available through the Morfeo open source community. The Claudia platform can also be integrated with the OpenNebula cloud management framework.

OpenNebula is an open source toolkit, with excellent performance and scalability to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, with high integration capabilities to fit into any existing data center, and with the most advanced functionality for building private, public and hybrid clouds. It provides the most common cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management The OpenNebula platform is available under Apache license on its community site and on the Morfeo open source community. Explanations are available on how to integrate the Claudia and the OpenNebula platforms.

To help secure the integrated Claudia and OpenNebula platforms, security services are also planned for release on Morfeo. The security services provide access control for the public interfaces of the IaaS cloud, and allow securing an IaaS federation. Role based access control will protect both the Claudia and OpenNebula public interfaces. Role based access control is provided in combination with X509 certificates to provide authorisation, authentication and integrity checks. Security services are also provided to secure the IaaS federation. They allow providing authentication between data centres within a cloud federation, and enforcing global security policies in a federation.

Want to Build a Cloud Infrastructure Using the RESERVOIR Framework?

RESERVOIR is also providing training, giving insight into the RESERVOIR Framework. Our experts offer consulting on the architecture, the individual RESERVOIR components, and how to integrate these to build an open source cloud infrastructure. Training also aims to teach users how to create service definitions and submit them to a RESERVOIR infrastructure for deployment. Details on RESERVOIR training can be accessed from the ‘Technical Information’ section on www.reservoir-fp7.eu.

RESERVOIR, Open Source and European Perspectives

The European Commission recently highlighted, in an Expert Group’s Report on the Future of Cloud Computing, the need for coordinating open source initiatives between Research and Industry, aimed at promoting the emergence of flexible cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. The FP7 RESERVOIR project is making significant contributions in this direction by defining an open federated infrastructure cloud architecture, and delivering a framework of open source components for building infrastructure clouds.

More Stories By Ignacio M. Llorente

Ignacio M. Llorente, Ph.D in Computer Science (UCM) and Executive MBA (IE Business School), is a Full Professor in Computer Architecture and Technology, and the Head of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid. He has held several appointments as an independent expert for the European Commission (Information Society and Media Directorate-General); visiting positions at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA); consultancy positions with Sun Microsystems; and a Senior Researcher position in the Advanced Computing Lab at CAB (CSIC/INTA center associated to NASA Astrobiology Institute).

He has 17 years of experience in research and development of advanced distributed computing and virtualization technologies, architecture of large-scale distributed infrastructures and resource provisioning platforms, and management of international projects and initiatives on Grid and Cloud Computing; having led the research group in 15 sponsored projects; having published more than 130 scientific papers in the leading journals and proceedings books; and having participated in the program committee of several yearly-celebrated workshops and conferences.

His current research interests are mainly in the area of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud Computing, co-leading the research and development of the OpenNebula Toolkit for Cloud Computing and coordinating the Activity on Management of Virtual Execution Environments in the RESERVOIR Project, main EU-funded research initiative in virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. He founded and co-chaired the Open Grid Forum Working Group on Open Cloud Computing Interface; and participates in the European Cloud Computing Group of Experts.